What incels say about Charlie Kirk Message boards were ablaze

When I first heard the news, via a WhatsApp groupchat, that Charlie Kirk had been assassinated, I didn’t hesitate to click on the link to the tweet announcing it and nor about activating the video that showed the bullet rip into his neck. I wish I’d exercised more caution. I’ve seen a lot of gore porn in my time, but watching this horrifying morsel of snuff footage made me feel sick to my gut.

Meanwhile, other people on the internet, with strange pseudonyms and even stranger avatars, processed the news and footage in a rather different way: they liked it. This is because they thought Kirk deserved to be murdered — because of who he was, what he had said and how he lived. Their joy was a righteous joy and they didn’t feel embarrassed about sharing it. And if they showed any empathy, it was towards Kirk’s murderer, who, in their eyes, had done the world a favour.

Many of these people, judging by their social media profiles and other obvious tells, were from the liberal Left, where justifying or excusing violence against the powerful or the “oppressor class” has a long and shameful pedigree. But a good number came from two fringe communities that on the face of it would appear to have little in common: incels (i.e. sexually frustrated men who self-identify as “involuntary celibate”) and trans women. I know this because last week I spent the best part of a day trawling through their respective online echo-chambers to see what they were saying about Kirk’s murder.

One of these forums is estimated to have more than 20,000 active members. Here, incels share their personal testimonies and vent. The news of Kirk’s death provoked a chorus of celebration: “Rest in Piss bitch,” wrote one poster. “I feel kind of happy to hear this news and see this video,” chimed in another. “Good, death to all normies,” read yet another post. Soon enough, a consensus had solidified, which was that Kirk’s murder was a good thing because he was a normal person — a “normoid” — who had a wife and children. “Not a single drop of empathy for a 6’3 MTN [mid-tier normie] neurotypical IQ mogger with wife and kids,” read one post. Mogger, for those who aren’t familiar with internet incel slang, refers to a male who, by virtue of their physical attractiveness or rhetorical skills, threatens the masculinity of other men lacking in those traits, while “mid-tier normie” refers to a moderately attractive male. “Agreed,” noted one poster, “he was a normie sex haver.” In other words, Kirk deserved to die because he had the sort of life that incels vehemently desire but are unable to achieve.

In many posts, a narrative had formed: they (the normies) hate us (the incels) and want us dead: so fuck them. For example: “Just because troons [trans-identifying people] hate him [Kirk] as well won’t make me change my opinion… He would’ve bullied me to my death. I celebrate the death of normscums.”

Some incels had more specific reasons for celebrating Kirk’s murder, mainly to do with his support for Israel and their own raging anti-Semitism and misogyny. “He was a gynocentric constantly talking about protecting white foids [women],” thundered one poster. “He was a zionist dog,” fumed another.” One self-avowed accelerationist (i.e. someone who agitates for the demise of liberal capitalist society) excitedly wondered whether Kirk’s murder would spark a wider civil war leading to societal collapse and anarchy.

This is not to say that there were no dissenting voices on the forum. There was one, who valiantly pleaded: “Whatever the disagreement you and others had with him [Kirk] over his support for Israel, this kind of violence is not the solution. We can’t lose our humanity.” This post drew precisely zero responses.

The same perverted logic that classifies Kirk’s murder as a justifiable punishment was similarly rampant across the trans women online forum I visited. It is a forum where thousands of posters share personal stories and vent about their troubles in much the same way incels do. Many posters responded to the news of Kirk’s murder with unbridled glee, not by saying anything but by posting GIFs. One showed a man smoking a cigar, with the caption “Rest in piss you won’t be missed”. Another showed Jeremy Clarkson sardonically mouthing the words “Oh no! Anyway.”

Most posters, though, were more forthcoming. One asked: “Anyone else suddenly feeling in a good mood?” Another responded: “I’m celebrating too. I did a little dance. I sang ‘Stayin’ Alive.’ And I had a couple of tequila shots.” Others were more measured, clarifying that what they were celebrating was not Kirk’s death, exactly, but rather, in the words of one post, “the prevention of future harmful and hateful actions/effects to society that his death represents”. This was a persistent theme in many of the hundreds of posts I came across: that Kirk constituted an existential threat to trans people and thus deserved not a shred of empathy. “I feel sorry for his family,” one poster wrote, “but this guy was a piece of shit. For years, he advocated violence against transgender people, insinuating he was going to kill us.” Others were even more scathing: “He wasn’t a person. Just a Nazi in human skin.”

A few responded to the news of Kirk’s murder by expressing alarm at how it would rebound on them. “My concern,” said one, “is that MAGA/GOP will use this as another dog whistle to eradicate us.” Another confided that while they were thrilled to hear the news of Kirk’s death, this feeling was attenuated by the “fear that the government will use this as an excuse to harm us”.

Not all of the posts on the trans forums I documented were unhinged. On the contrary, some were decent: “I find this terrifying and sad,” one confided. It continued: “Obviously we all here completely disagree with Charlie Kirk’s beliefs in a deeply profound way… But political violence has no place in a democracy and it speaks to a sickness within our democracies.” Nevertheless, such sentiments were either ignored or ridiculed by many others. “It [violence] has a place. Utah!,” replied one poster to the above plea for common decency and humanity.

On deeper reflection, the similarities between the two forums shouldn’t be so surprising, for there are many striking parallels between these two subcultures. Both incels and trans women have experienced a profound sense of personal crisis and frustration due to perceived problems with the bodies they inhabit — whether, in the case of incels, because the body is experienced as physically unattractive or, in the case or trans women, because it is at odds with how they see their “true” gender identity. Both have come to believe that mainstream society is conspiratorially ranged against them and threatens their very existence. Both, at the extremes, celebrate or condone violence against their enemies. Both dehumanise certain kinds of women and exhibit blatant misogyny towards them: “Stacys” and “Terfs” respectively. Both suffer from high rates of depression and self-harm. And both have provoked moral panics. Indeed, incels are to liberals what trans people are to the Right: namely, a threat to their most sacred values. Where trans people threaten the sanctity of the male-female distinction, incels threaten gender equality.

The other parallel that stands out is that violence associated with these two subcultures is exceedingly rare when compared to other kinds of political violence. According to one well-cited academic study on incels, incel-related violence has claimed the lives of nearly 50 victims globally. This is 50 too many, but is vastly overshadowed by, for example, the menace of jihadi terrorism, which in Western Europe alone has caused the deaths of over 650 people since 1994, injuring well over 5000 more. Levels of trans-related lethal violence are considerably lower, although solid data is still lacking on this. Understanding why there is so little incel and trans violence, given the inflammatory rhetoric that both groups engage in, would be a useful area of future research. (The evolutionary psychologists William Costello and David Buss have gone some way towards explaining this in respect to incels, tentatively speculating that sustained exposure to online pornography, gaming and shit-posting has a sedative effect on incels.)

I have written before about the moral panic over incels and how the response to them has been so disproportionately excessive among liberals and in the media. I would caution against the same over-reaction to trans culture, which seems to be provoking similar levels of derangement on the Right. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take the threat of trans violence seriously, but overstating the extent of their violence is wrong and will further inflame their persecution fantasies and militant rhetoric.

Kirk’s murder is an outrage and should be condemned in the severest terms. But it also offers a fascinating mirror onto our rapidly evolving extremist landscape, where fringe online communities with radically different aims converge in a ghoulish embrace of puerility and the dehumanisation of anyone who doesn’t think like them.

We should expose these communities to censure and even ridicule. We should also strive to better understand why and how they come to think in such dangerously binary ways. But we shouldn’t bewitch ourselves into thinking that they are more powerful than they are, much less start trading in the same paranoid and apocalyptic language so beloved of the extremists at the edge.

---